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Zune Sales Not So Bad After All
pyrbrand writes "Despite the iFanboy jabber that Zune sales were horrific, CNN has a story to the contrary. Turns out Zune was the #2 Digital Audio player in its first week of sales. Not a bad start for the challenger to the iPod throne. As others have pointed out the Amazon sales rank may have been thrown off by Zune sales being divided between the three colors."
Aren't the sales for ipods also divided between all the various models and colors?
That's the nature of statistics.
And fanboys.
I am a touch surprised that it beat out sandisk, since sandisk sells more at amazon.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The situation with Zune/iPod is no different than the situation with Office/ODF. *More* real choices = better for the consumer and lower prices by all! We need a serious challenger to Apple for no other reason than to force them to cross that final frontier - playing nicely with everyone else (i.e., not forcing their product chain down our throats with restrictive DRM). Once their current feature-set become commoditized, they'll have no choice but to add interoperability as a feature to differentiate themselves.
They haven't accounted for returns though ;-)
IMO, it isn't exactly fair to compare "Zune" with "ALL of the iPods".
The Zune targets one small slice of territory that Apple has already staked out.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Personally I believe the WiFi feature will be a difference-maker, but as currently implemented on the Zune it isn't very enticing. I expect MS to come out with a software update in 6 months or so that will dramatically improve the wireless functionality. I used the early Smartphones and they had similar rough edges - they were clunky and missing many "obvious" features. But MS kept plugging along and now they have a very competitive phone operating system. With their resources and long-term view I figure they will ultimately make the Zune a formidible competitor to the iPod franchise. We also should remember that it's still early yet in this game. Portable media players only last about 3-4 years, so we haven't even really seen the first big replacement wave yet.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
And I hate to reply to myself here, but I can't help but wonder if Apple is making the same mistake they made before - creating a closed-technology stack for short term profits. I can't really argue against Jobs for doing this (he's a billionaire after all), but as was proven in the old days of the Apple, eventually the competition catches up and cuts you off at the knees. There's something to be said for playing nicely with everyone.
"Despite the iFanboy jabber"
Did anybody else stop reading after that?
Disagree with me? Tell me why, but follow these rules.
Since the numbers are from big box retailers only, they are pretty skewed. No online (no store.apple.com, Amazon, etc), probably not Apple's retail stores either.
Considering the initial curiosity factor and Microsoft employees, I would have expected the initial uptake to have a bigger impact than even this. If they are starting at this low of a baseline... lets just say Creative and SanDisk probably don't have much to worry about.
That's a little misleading of an argument, considering what it really does (and it's usefulness)
They can do whatever they want. I won't buy it, and it doesn't harm me
" shenanigans are setting "precedent". Now, everyone else (Apple) is "encouraged" to do the same...
Wait, huh? Oh crap, I forgot. Microsoft's "we'll-pay-you-an-'all-our-users-are-thieves'-tax
Damn...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Certainly there was some base of people who wanted (some later to be usefull) wi-fi plus an FM receiver plus video at that price point. Microsoft advertized enough that these people knew about it, so they got it when they first had their chance. That group of people, however, is not particularly related to digital music player buyers as a whole, as it is only continuous purchases over its life span that will be untimately meaningful. Furthermore, this week was singled out from the Zune being the only new thing on the market. That they only got second when they were the only new thing around--for over a month or something?--is actually rather sad.
A more representative week would be, say, the week after Thanksgiving, which shows a lot about retail buying habits (and is a significant percentage of such).
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
In all seriousness that's actually a great gift for someone with an old record collection which is pretty much everyone over 40 or 50.
Work Safe Porn
I suppose if your talking DRM only then you are correct. Apple holds a monopoly on the idiocy of DRM in digital music stores and players. But the last thing we need is another player with competing DRM, we need to get rid of DRM altogether.
The market for MP3 players is highly competitive, Zune brings nothing new to the market and is simply a Microsoft me too product. It will make no difference in fair use for music consumers and in fact brings a BS royalty tax on every device consumers purchase. Now even if you don't buy the corporate backed music you still have to pay for it in the form of a royalty to the coroprate music industry on every Zune sold. Thanks Microsoft.
burnin
It's a new gadget and it was hyped to the extreme. Obviously it';s going to sell well. The sad thing is the new product buzz didn't stop people from buying "old" iPods at a FAR larger rate. And the study doesn't even include iPods sold in Apple Stores, which is a huge bias. Look at where the Zune is now. It's nowhere. Nice try, but the numbers don't mean a damn thing unless they're sustainable.
Normally I would agree with you .. it would be nice for Apple to have pressure to do new better stuff with their ipod besides make it smaller and redder. But, and this pains me to say, in this case Apple seems to have actually done good with their dictatorship (it pains me to say dictatorships are good, rather than saying something bad about Apple).
./ stories, but because M$ caved into Universal, it's now causing issues for Apple. Apple was the only company willing to fight for a flat rate for the consumer and make it work. If it weren't for Apple's iTunes store, buying music onlne would still really suck.
See the related
And no, I don't like DRM'd crap, but I do like our environment better, and don't care to pollute it with more CDs that I'm just going to rip. Would I rather just because to get plain MP3s. Yeah, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon. From personal experience, Apple's DRM is pretty decent, and only got in the way once, where I had to deauthorize all my computers.
So in this case, competition actually isn't looking good for consumer's rights, primarily because most consumers buying these things aren't well informed.
Apple's music store has DRM, but there isn't any anywhere else. The Zune adds DRM to your un-DRMed songs for you. Plus the music industry royalty, that they're now pressuring Apple to add. Seems like a definite step backward.
"#2 Digital Audio player in its first week of sales" Its only the first week. Products usually post their strongest numbers when they launch. Let's see their numbers after 1 year of sales.
How you can compare the DRM infested Zune with ODF is beyond me. One is an open document specification that could enable people on different OS, hardware, or software to exchange files, the other is a closed platform music player with DRM so restrictive that your entire music collection can auto-delete itself because you forgot to pay your monthly bill...
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Apple has had some good competition already - the Archos players, the Creative stuff and the Sandisk. Each of those has brought something interesting to the table and made Apple keep advancing.
What has the Zune brought that's new? WiFi sharing that is so limited it does not exist, and the standard now that EVERY MP3 player going forward will be pressed by labels to pay a small fee just for the right to exist! Has the existance of the Zune REALLY improved the market in any way?
Competition is great, but Microsoft left the door wide open for the RIAA to get a foot in. For that alone they deserve endless scorn and market failure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Microsoft has enough employees who will have to buy their crappy product (to show company spirit) to stay in the top 3 for at least another two weeks. And then it's over.
Apple wasn't the first out to market with an mp3 player but unlike MS they did their research. Every new generation of Ipod gets better its interface is extremely easy to learn and use. Itunes is not bad and I went out and bought 5th gen video ipod just because of how easy it is to subscribe to podcasts (G4, SG, etc) and ease of keeping everything in sync.
I purchased the very second mp3 player that became commercially available in USA - Diamond Rio PMP300 in 1998 and Creative Lab's Nomad ][ a little bit later. Both were not great and the first suffered from slow transfer speed and second from just-ok interface but at least both products worked out of the box and I didn't have to wait a year for some feature that was promised to start working - NO wireless sync with PC(even my old motorola e680i phone can do this via bluetooth), crippled song "sharing" and no Vista support YET even though Vista is shipping in a month to PC manufacturers. Very rushed - feels like a pot-luck dinner.
Finally, I think MS blew it because they are a software company first and they couldn't even write (OR STEAL) something decent. They only had 10 year to sit there and watch everyone else do it. I feel bad for Toshiba, they didn't really need this.
I guess they didn't learn from Panasonic's 3DO fiasco where Trip Hawking tricked them into giving his company $100 million to blow on a video game system that didn't sell well.
There is a very simple reason to both avoid purchase of the Zune and pray to 42 that it fails. For every Zune sale, the record industry gets a cut. If you buy a Zune, you are propping up the RIAA. You are essentially paying a tax that assumes you are guilty of copyright infringement before you've even committed it (and of course you could get still get sued by the RIAA even after paying the absurd tax). This should sound familiar to Canadians.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Let us all help the band play merrily along while the Zune ship slides into the murky waters of consumer disinterest, by labeling this and all subsequent Zune trolling articles with the flag "zuneral".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While I agree in principle with you, iPods are designed to be used as portable audio players. Being able to use them as an external drive is a bonus, not an advertised feature. On the other hand, the blank CD tax in Canada is truly unfair, because blank media is designed to be used in a large number of ways, NOT just audio. I think of the last 200 CDs I've burned, about five were audio (and MP3 CDs at that, which is a data disc on a technicality). Since finding that old cassette adapter that I plug into my iPod, I've had no need for audio CDs.
And for the sake of Devil's Advocate, you should (by the industry's logic) be forced to pay a royalty for using your iPod as a portable drive for your camera. Not for the music, but for the painfully high chance that you've snapped a shot that included something copyrighted... basically anything with a backdrop other than a landscape (ads plastered everywhere, any branded products, etc). Just like the painfully high chance you infringed copyright of (not stole... they still have their copy!) music, right?
Don't get me wrong. The idea sucks, and is downright offensive to almost everyone who actually buys music. But a piracy tax on iPods DOES make more sense than blank media taxes, simply due to intended use. As far as I'm concerned, Apple shouldn't have to pay them a cent as long as they keep the "Don't steal music." sticker on the front (nor should any other brand). As far as I'm concerned, such a tax legitimizes piracy - a Slashdot post I read earlier today indicated that this logic held up in Canadian court. I'd be all for the idea if I didn't know that the logic couldn't possibly hold up in a court system as screwed up as our (US) own.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
MUCH warmer.
"Warmer" is a code word for "distorted". You may like the effect of the distortion -- but it's still distortion, and not the way the sound is intended to be heard. See also: tube amps.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Microsoft didn't "cave" to Universal. To "cave" implies resistance. Microsoft and Universal have always been on the same page.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"i.e., not forcing their product chain down our throats with restrictive DRM)"
As other have pointed out one billion times, Apple doesn't force restrictive DRM on anyone. You can use your iTunes and iPod without one illegal, low quality, DRM'd file.
Not one. I can buy 1000 CD's from my local music store, RIP them, and have iTunes synch them to my iPod und DRM'd, legally (unlike the Zune's software counterpart).
If you wish to purchase songs legally for download via the internets, iTunes not only has a far more sane DRM scheme than almost all others, but I've never fealt restricted by it. Not one bit. I can burn CD's, copy them to other computers (5 a year... do you need to reasonably have them on more?), and can even RIP those burned CD's to produce non-DRM'd iTunes purchased songs.
I have no idea why people still claim this.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
the Amazon sales rank may have been thrown off by Zune sales being divided between the three colors.
You mean, like the iPod sales being divided between 14 or so models and colours?
Yes, the zune's initial week was fairly good. If you read just a little further on any mainstream press article, however, you'll see that the total failure was attributed not to first week sales, but to the fact that after all the fanboys and easy-to-fool idiots had bought one, sales dropped to almost nothing. The same Amazon sales rank that was #2 in the first week was #13 in the second if I recall correctly. Right now, it's #60, which definitely qualifies as "abysmal". The 4 GB silver nano, the lowest listed iPod model, beats it jumping on one leg with both hands tied behind its back (rank #15).
Sorry, MS fanboy, zune is as dead as a doornail and twice as hard to sell.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That article is hilarious. His first comment, "I still think it's an excellent portable media player." Then he goes on to list 10 doozies that microsoft needs to fix, actually what he's saying is, "I need portable media player produced by someone else." But I don't think he's figured that part out yet.
If I thought a piracy tax would end all other forms of litigation and DRM from the RIAA,
I might give it some credence, but we all know it won't. They want it both ways.
Maxim